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Calendar Block limitation

  • June 11, 2020
  • 4 replies
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M
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When importing a ics file with recurrence I am loosing information I want to include namely which day of the week is used (See RRULE field). How can I get this information pulled in?

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
CREATED:20200611T184358Z
DESCRIPTION:Regression Data Collection\n
DTEND;TZID=“Eastern Standard Time”:20200611T163000
DTSTAMP:20200611T184358Z
DTSTART;TZID=“Eastern Standard Time”:20200611T160000
LAST-MODIFIED:20200611T184358Z
LOCATION:new grid
PRIORITY:5
RRULE:FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=SU,MO,TU,TH,FR,SA
SEQUENCE:0
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:fred
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Best answer by Justin_Barrett

Could you provide more detail on what you hope to achieve with this data import? Are you hoping to use these to drive a calendar view in Airtable? Unfortunately Airtable’s calendar view does not support event recurrence. Each calendar entry directly ties to a single record. To have a recurring item, you would need to duplicate that record and change the date for each duplicate.

If I’ve misunderstood something, please describe your desired end goal in detail so that we can better assist.

    4 replies

    Justin_Barrett
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    • Justin_Barrett
    • Inspiring
    • 4647 replies
    • Answer
    • June 11, 2020

    Could you provide more detail on what you hope to achieve with this data import? Are you hoping to use these to drive a calendar view in Airtable? Unfortunately Airtable’s calendar view does not support event recurrence. Each calendar entry directly ties to a single record. To have a recurring item, you would need to duplicate that record and change the date for each duplicate.

    If I’ve misunderstood something, please describe your desired end goal in detail so that we can better assist.

    M
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    • Marshall_Johnso
    • Author
    • Inspiring
    • 14 replies
    • June 12, 2020

    For each of 40+ projects and growing rapidly, we run tests on different days of the week
    Daily, Fri-Su, M-F. Single days, MWF, Tu Th, These change on a weekly basis based on need.
    I was hoping to use an ICS which does support specifying recurrence to import this data as it was a simple thing to do. However it did seem to mean one .ics per project which was a lot of imports from our Univa test grid which was not great unless I could get it to be automatic.
    However, as it turns out, We actually dont care what day of the month or year it is, so for now I think found a way around it by importing a single .cvs instead. We will have to write a little python to format what we have but I expect that will work fine. The upside is we can do a single import on any change.
    So my request is changing…to a automatic import when airtable is opened of a .cvs such that we dont need to do anything except look at a column to see when the last update occured. But I guess I need to post that somewhere else and let this one close.

    Justin_Barrett
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    • Justin_Barrett
    • Inspiring
    • 4647 replies
    • June 12, 2020

    For each of 40+ projects and growing rapidly, we run tests on different days of the week
    Daily, Fri-Su, M-F. Single days, MWF, Tu Th, These change on a weekly basis based on need.
    I was hoping to use an ICS which does support specifying recurrence to import this data as it was a simple thing to do. However it did seem to mean one .ics per project which was a lot of imports from our Univa test grid which was not great unless I could get it to be automatic.
    However, as it turns out, We actually dont care what day of the month or year it is, so for now I think found a way around it by importing a single .cvs instead. We will have to write a little python to format what we have but I expect that will work fine. The upside is we can do a single import on any change.
    So my request is changing…to a automatic import when airtable is opened of a .cvs such that we dont need to do anything except look at a column to see when the last update occured. But I guess I need to post that somewhere else and let this one close.


    Understood. If you would, please mark my comment above as the solution to the calendar event recurrence part of your question. This helps others who may be searching with similar questions. Thanks!

    Regarding automatic CSV (not CVS) import, that may be tricky. Airtable currently doesn’t have any built-in automation features that would allow you to perform any automatic operations upon opening. You might look into automation tools like Zapier or Integromat, and see if you can use them to parse the calendar data and update Airtable on a schedule. You might also search elsewhere in the community for threads re: CSV import. I believe there have been a few in recent weeks/months, and you may find other options in those.

    M
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    • Marshall_Johnso
    • Author
    • Inspiring
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    • June 15, 2020

    Understood. If you would, please mark my comment above as the solution to the calendar event recurrence part of your question. This helps others who may be searching with similar questions. Thanks!

    Regarding automatic CSV (not CVS) import, that may be tricky. Airtable currently doesn’t have any built-in automation features that would allow you to perform any automatic operations upon opening. You might look into automation tools like Zapier or Integromat, and see if you can use them to parse the calendar data and update Airtable on a schedule. You might also search elsewhere in the community for threads re: CSV import. I believe there have been a few in recent weeks/months, and you may find other options in those.


    I marked it as a solution above for the calendar issue. However, It does not take long with a single csv file to update airtable so that is workable (individual .ics for each item would not work as a practical matter if it were not automatic so we are going with the .csv). I will look into the other tools but adding more tools is not our first choice so I hope that .csv import will just improve to allow all the automatic field matching to go through and only get prompted if something is new. (it seems nearly there now as all it really needs is a import setting on the .csv to automatically click ok if all fields match.


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